Review Synology DS916+

[Ian]

Ian submitted a new article:

Synology DS916+ - We review this mid-range 4-Bay NAS from Synology, which features integrated Docker and Plex support.

The Synology DS916+ is a mid-range NAS, aimed at small businesses or home users requiring more power than most consumer grade units. The quad core 64-bit Intel Pentium N3710 and options of 2/8GB RAM suggest that this is more than a traditional file server NAS. This choice of CPU allows for AES-NI encryption acceleration (an otherwise CPU intensive task), along with the power to transcode video if you’re using this as a media server (H.264 and H.265 acceleration). There are 4 drive bays...

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[V_R]

Ooooh, now that is interesting as one of the things that stopped me buying a NAS before was reports of them not being man enough to transcode on the fly.... What transcoding settings were you using in Plex? Just Automatic?

Also, can I have a ELI5, what is Docker?

Sorry to point it out but there are a couple of things that could do with an edit:

DSM Web Interface needs a return after the pic and just after that within the 'Features' section it says '(without or without encoding)'

That's not like you two at all.

 

[Ian]

Thanks @V_R, fixed that now .

Also, can I have a ELI5, what is Docker?

Docker is a software container platform, where you can download an app/server/package with a couple of clicks and then configure it to run in a virtualised container. For example, you could run Plex in a Docker container and configure it to be allowed to use 1CPU, 2GB RAM and however much disk space. I use it extensively, as I can download Dockers for PHP/MySQL/nginx etc... and run a webserver in a few minutes.

Docker containers can be run on Linux, Windows, Mac and all sorts of other operating systems. They're OS independent and there's a huge repository here:

https://hub.docker.com/

It was recommended to me a long time ago, but I didn't start using it till a couple of years ago - and I haven't looked back. One of the first things I set up was a Plex server - it took about 2 mins to get it up and running .

What transcoding settings were you using in Plex? Just Automatic?

Everything was set to automatic, although I did find that it struggled on occasion when I tried to force it to transcode a 1080p 5.1 Stream on the fly. If we use Direct Play/Direct Stream, then it didn't get troubled at all. If this NAS gets hardware acceleration enabled in Plex for transcoding, I think it'll be a good choice if direct stream isn't available. I'm using QNAP for our Plex streaming at the moment and the CPU is barely troubled when transcoding is required. We've got a TV tuner and use Plex as our DVR (a little buggy, but improving rapidly!).